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SEO can be tricky in terms of nailing down your business goals, and what you represent. However, it really is a case of keeping on top of producing regular, quality content as well as going back through and making regular tweaks when you can. Maybe schedule in an hour or two a week devoted to adapting previous content to get rid of the SEO nonos such as duplicate content. Producing regular blog content related to your business field, including news, either about the industry or your business itself, it going to go a long way in helping your organic standings.

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Community Leader

Community Leader

SEO can be tricky in terms of nailing down your business goals, and what you represent. However, it really is a case of keeping on top of producing regular, quality content as well as going back through and making regular tweaks when you can.

SEO is very easy and interesting task. If talking about better rankings in SERPs, quality content and quality backlinks are both play important role to get better ranking in google.

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Quality content is definitely important, and it may be necessary to tweak it once in a while, but without quality links, your content is not going to go anywhere. As Smith-K pointed out, they both play an important role, and both serve a different purpose. In order to attract the visitors you need, you have to have content on the website that is engaging and informative, and holds the visitors attention, gives the visitor the information they need, and/or provides what they are looking for. If the purpose of the website is to get the visitor to do something, it needs to clearly tell them what to do, and encourage or convince them to do it. If the purpose is to allow them to do something, i.e. buy a product, the website must make the desired task as easy as possible. If the purpose is research, the website must provide as much information as possible - for example, if the visitor wants to complete a task, the website must give them enough information to allow them to complete the task. Unless there are variables involved, no one wants to go to several websites, or several pages in a website, to get the information they need. If the number of variables is small, and can be easily specified, they can be covered in a single page. If it is necessary to go to another page, that page needs to be readily available(in other words, link to it).
For backlinks, it is no longer a case of "he who has the most links, wins". They now must be quality links, from quality sites, and there must be a reason for them to be there. Even the content that contains the link(s) must be quality content, and the words used to create the link, in an article or blog post, must sound natural. For others, like directory links, it makes sense to have a link in your listing. But, you can't just flood your link profile with directory links - the directories themselves must be quality sites.
I do disagree with Smith-K when he says that "SEO is very easy". It is not, nor was it meant to be. In order to "earn" your place at the top of the SERPs, you have to show you belong there, and you need to be willing to do the work to get there

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SEO can be tricky in terms of nailing down your business goals, and what you represent. However, it really is a case of keeping on top of producing regular, quality content as well as going back through and making regular tweaks when you can. Maybe schedule in an hour or two a week devoted to adapting previous content to get rid of the SEO nonos such as duplicate content. Producing regular blog content related to your business field, including news, either about the industry or your business itself, it going to go a long way in helping your organic standings.

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Are good quality backlinks still the best for SEO? Or are there any new trends for white hat SEO?

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Community Leader

Community Leader

Are good quality backlinks still the best for SEO? Or are there any new trends for white hat SEO?

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Absolutely. But, as both Website Design and I pointed out, the quality of your content also matters. You can no longer just create your own links, no matter how good they may be. You also need to promote your content to get others to link to you. In order to do that, you have to create engaging and informative content, and cultivate relationships with others by not only sharing your content, but by participating in their conversations as well, as long as your participation adds to the value of that conversation. Unlike those who recommend you add links to forum or blog comments(which hasn't been recommended by professionals for quite some time, by the way), your participation is to show that you have knowledge and expertise to add to the discussion, so that they will link to you.
You're also going to want to make sure your website is mobile-friendly, as Google now uses that as a ranking signal, and is moving toward a mobile-first technique for their algorithm.

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Great stuff Joseph and will take it on board. I have been told that back links from high page ranking sites are the best overall single technique to improve your SEO. Do you agree with this or do you rank content as the main factor.

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Community Leader

Community Leader

Great stuff Joseph and will take it on board. I have been told that back links from high page ranking sites are the best overall single technique to improve your SEO. Do you agree with this or do you rank content as the main factor.

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As I said in my previous post, the quality of your content matters. You can promote your content all you want, encouraging others to link to it, and create links yourself, but without quality content, no one will link to it, and it will not get ranked. So, yes, the content comes first, making sure it is engaging and informative, and making sure you have the proper keyword(s) in your content without stuffing. But without quality links, you also won't rank anywhere. So, after you create the quality content, only then should you promote your site, creating and encouraging quality links.

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Community Leader

Community Leader

Interesting Joseph as in the past I have had advice that Google has dismissed keywords because of the overuse of them. Do contextual links influence content or is it merely having volume?

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Contextual links will only influence the content in determining if they "fit", and where they are placed. How often they are used is a minor consideration, referred to as "keyword density". Other than making sure you are not "stuffing" the content with keywords, and making sure they sound "natural", density should not be a concern.

LOL.. It's easy mate. After all it totally depends on you, what the way and strategy you choose to do it.

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Whatever strategy you use, it should not be "easy". Taking the easy road is a path to the "dark side", using techniques that violate the Webmaster Guidelines, because you don't want to take the rime to do itproperly.

Would have to disagree there as SEO is time consuming and with no instance results to show you are going in the correct direction.

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I'm with Grant on this one. SEO is not intended to provide "instant" results, and may not even be a steady rise. SEO is a long term effort, and is intended to give results that last over the long term. Do the work the right way, and you will reap the rewards.

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Hi Joseph great advise and something I have started to implement on my photography blog. In the past I had mainly filled it with shots from commissions but now adding plenty of content to contribute to each post. Do you suggest getting followers leaving comments on the blog or posting as links to social media?

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Community Leader

Community Leader

Do you suggest getting followers leaving comments on the blog or posting as links to social media?

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Did you mean posting links to the blog on social media? Followers of the blog leaving comments can help add content, but you will need to moderate the blog to make sure they are adding quality content, and not junk. Once you create each blog post, you can share it on social media, which will create a link to it. Your followers on social media can then share it with their followers, who share it with theirs, and so on, giving you more links. So, both would help, but in different ways.

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I was concerned about blog comments because of the amount of spam and wether Google still looked in them in a positive manner. I turned off my comments and Google continued to favour my blog as if I google the post title google will have indexed as a top result within days.

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Community Leader

Community Leader

As I have a photographic blog which contains mainly images I would go for good backlinks.

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In the majority of cases, I would say both, but work on the content, or what we call on-page optimization, first. Of course, on-page optimization includes other items as well as the actual content of the page. Then, obtain links by promoting your content in various social media sites, adding links to blog posts and articles you write for other sites, and include links in videos.
Grantly, I would stick with what you mentioned previously about adding content to your blog posts, depending on where you want to rank and for what keywords. If you want the images to be shown when people search the "Images" section of the search engines, work on adding Alt tags to the images you post. Of course, the same would apply if you want the blog to rank for the keywords, but you would need to add content to each blog post as well.

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